A comedy club might seem like an unlikely place to hold a hip-hop concert, but that isn’t stopping Aaris Schroeder (founder of UBO Mag) and her crew from throwing what is arguably one of the best hip-hop shows this fall at Laughs Unlimited in Old Sacramento on Thursday, Nov. 18. San Francisco-based MC Equipto from the group Bored Stiff, who is also known for his work with Andre Nickatina, will headline the show and with him will be members of his label’s crew (Solidarity Records), including P.W. Esquire, TabbDoe and B-Line. Also performing will be Z-Man from One Block Radius, and if you’ve ever seen him spit live, you know he’s the real deal. Another musical treat that night will be Michael Marshall, lead singer of the ‘80s R&B/funk band Timex Social Club. Marshall is probably best known for singing the hook on the timeless track “I Got 5 on It” from the rap group Luniz. Local heavy-hitters The Cuf and DJ Kool Kuts are also on the bill, further solidifying the dope-ness of the lineup. Hosting the event will be Big Sta The Legacy, an artist originally from Oakland who now resides in Sacramento. The show is 18-and-over and is only $10 at the door. Music starts at 10 p.m.

Calling The Batusis a “punk rock supergroup” seems cliché, but it’s accurate. Sylvain Sylvain is the wildly charismatic New York Dolls guitarist and Cheetah Chrome has wielded the axe for Cleveland icons Rocket From the Tombs and Dead Boys. Both of these guys have heavily influenced the direction of punk rock throughout their lengthy careers, but this is the first-ever collaboration between the two longtime friends. In Batusis, the two share guitar duties and take turns on lead vocals. Their self-titled EP, released by Smog Veil Records, is four tracks of loud, brash and fun punk rock, just the way they like it. On the EP Chrome and Sylvain are backed by the rhythm section of Joan Jett’s band, The Blackhearts, but when they hit Sacramento on Oct. 23, 2010 at the Blue Lamp the two will have Lez Warner of The Cult on drums and Sean Koos (who also lends his abilities to The Blackhearts) on bass. Opening this epic night as local punk heroes The Secretions, further solidifying that this is a must-see show. Tickets are $10 in advance and $12 at the door.

You can catch them live at Sacramento State on Nov. 24 inside the University Ballroom, where dancing will no doubt ensue. Submerge caught up with drummer Jack Savidge as the band was preparing to play a show they helped organize called The Warehouse Project in Manchester.

You guys are almost at a point where you think it’s not going to happen for you, you start off recording songs in a garage, you make limited edition pressings of your music and then all of a sudden you’re on tour with Crystal Castles and then Interpol and after that signed to XL and are now label mates with Radiohead! Has the past couple years been a little overwhelming?
When we were recording the songs in the garage, there was never any fearing that, oh no things aren’t going well. Because as a band starting out, it’s always amazing to have a record of your music. That’s always been amazing for us. So, it wasn’t really like, “Oh no,” we’re just doing this thing and then all of a sudden it was a whirlwind. It seems to have grown kind of gradually. It’s kept on growing and growing and we’ve been touring pretty much relentlessly for the last couple of years. So I guess now we’re seeing the fruits of that. It’s always strange as a music fan, going into HMV and seeing your CD there and to read magazines that you’ve read since you were a teenager and read about yourself. Or seeing a TV program that you videoed as a teenager religiously and then you’re on them. It’s weird. We’re all sort of music obsessive, nerdy types. You can get really blasé about it because it just becomes another thing in the day that you’re going to do. Say, playing a big show or playing a festival. You do kind of get a sense of, look how far we’ve come. We’re doing these things that I dreamed of doing.

I watched your hi-tech Flip behind the scenes footage on the Web site, and it looks like the three of you genuinely get along really well. Is the songwriting process as agreeable?
Yeah, generally. There’s the occasional disagreement, but I think there have been a couple things that have been slight sticking points. Obviously it’s not all white and rosy. But it’s quite easy to, if there is a disagreement, it’s quite easy to just have a deep breath and then get on with it. The mood never gets too dark, even though there are differences of opinion. That’s important for a working relationship. Everyone has their opinions, but I suppose we spend so much time together that it’s either get on well with each other or just have a horrible time all the time. I think we’d rather just get along well with each other.

There’s a lot of emphasis on percussion in your songs. The new single “Kiss of Life” is a Brazilian rhythm, which I know is big inspiration for you guys. What is the layering process like? Do you have a percussive groove that leads the idea or do all the bells and whistles come later?
I’d say, usually beforehand. We generally work on songs from the bottom up. We get something that sounds—some kind of drums and bass groove that sounds good. You know, the mapping out of it all. What might be the verse, what might be the chorus. We tend to add a lot from there. Because of how we write, which is generally ideas go straight into the computer and then we can layer things up like that, rather than if we were working everything out in the mode of a live band. But we’d only be able to imagine half as many songs as there are hands able to play them at one time. As we work on the computer there’s a lot of room to put down loads of percussion and make something sound like a really big rhythm section before vocals get even thought about. We try to do as much to an instrumental track as we can and then usually it leads the way to adding vocals on top. I think it’s kind of helpful to him [Ed MacFarlane, vocalist] to have a vibe there and the percussion definitely helps that. It’s always an atmosphere thing—the percussion. You can get the impression of a lot of energy by building up those layers. That informs the rest of the song.

What is it about the Brazilian samba that interests you so much?
It’s just really exciting sounding music, because it’s so percussive and so intricate. It’s always going to sound really exciting. I think there’s a theme to that. It almost found us by accident, because look at “Jump in the Pool”: almost by accident that had a slight kind of a samba feel. Although that was never what we were actually aiming for, it just ended up like that. I guess it found us. Actually the stuff we’ve been doing recently, there hasn’t been an awful lot of songs that sound very Samba or anything.

What’s the new stuff starting to sound like?
It’s pretty varied, actually. We always want it to be varied. There’s one song that sounds a bit like R. Kelly or something.

Like “Trapped in the Closet?”
No [laughs]. More like “Vibe”-era R. Kelly; like Dangerous-era Michael Jackson. The sort of”¦ Is it new jack swing? I guess it’s new jack swing.

That ’90s R&B sound?
Yeah, yeah. But a bit more upbeat. I guess the ’90s were on Timbaland and stuff, who pushed it a bit more sparse and a bit slower and a bit weirder. But yeah, I think we’re vibing off the early ’90s stuff. There’s some quite groovy ones using a lot of”¦vaguely afro-y. But I don’t want to say that because everyone will think we’re going all Vampire Weekend or something. Actually, we’ve got three ballads on the go. We’ve never really had a very slow—I guess “Strobe” is quite slow; we’ve never really had very slow, lighters in the air songs. So maybe there’ll be a few of those on the next album.

I think what sets you guys apart from similar bands is the content in the lyrics. They’re not these hollow songs with a catchy hook. They have the hook but there’s an emotional edge to each song. Are the lyrics strictly Ed MacFarlane’s or does everybody contribute to the lyrical content?
Ed generally does all the lyrics. But we’ve done a couple of things all together like “On Board” we wrote together. Bits of “Jump in the Pool,” the chorus was a group effort. But Ed generally does it. I think it’s fair enough, because he’s the one who sings it night after night. He may as well believe in it.

It seems as though all these awards have overshadowed you guys, particularly your loss of the Mercury Prize. You joke on your Web site about not losing much sleep over these things, but it has to mean something to you to be nominated. Does it matter really? Or are you already jaded by awards?
I think genuinely, not in a kind of snotty way, but we’re generally not that bothered really. The first few times you’re nominated for an award, it’s really exciting. You get to dress up in some smart clothes and then go and have dinner and spot loads of famous people. Get really drunk on the wine that endlessly turns up at your table. After you’ve done it, you’ve kind of done it. I think for us the Mercury Prize was pretty special, because it’s one of those things that you grow up hearing about and you’re interested in. I remember when I was a teenager there being all this hype about it and who’s going to win; who your money is on. It’s a big talking point. About the others—it’s really nice to be nominated.

Friendly Fires will played alongside The xx at the University Union Ballroom on the campus of Sacramento State on Nov. 24, 2009.

Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band has the heart of a teen, literally.

“We didn’t necessarily know what we were getting ourselves into,” explained Benjamin Verdoes, co-founder and lead singer of Seattle, Wash.-based Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band. He talked over the group’s timeline as he waited patiently for wife and band mate Traci Eggleston to pick him up so they could head to the studio; there, they’d work out percussion kinks for the newest record. This has been Verdoes’ daily schedule as of late: work, then studio.

At this point, all the ideas have been born. The songs have all been written in full and are in the Mt. St. Helens repertoire. Verdoes has been anxious to get them recorded. Now they’re laying out a lot of basics, getting the skeleton of the album built so it can be out by early 2010. They’re progressing, but what’s left is “a lot of little details to fill in,” Benjamin said.

They might sound like old pros at this, but this is an incredibly young group. In fact, that’s essentially what Mt. St. Helens is known for: their youth, belonging in particular to their 14-year-old drummer (and Benjamin’s adopted younger brother), Marshall Verdoes.

“He kind of blows people’s minds every time they see him,” Benjamin said. “He doesn’t even necessarily look 14, and when people find out how old he is they’re genuinely awestruck.”

Mt. St. Helens actually started as just an idea between the Verdoes brothers. When Marshall was young (or younger”¦), Benjamin would bring him along to all the shows he attended, and Marshall would incessantly try to convince Benjamin that they should start a band together. Benjamin slowly started teaching him some tricks on percussion, and was impressed by Marshall’s quick knack for drums.

Benjamin had been involved in other various bands, but after watching his younger brother progress so fast and accurately on drums, he decided to experiment. The two began a project, roughly four years back, as a pair sparking fire for the first time.
“In some kind of form, in some rough primordial state, it was just us playing riffs,” Benjamin said.

It wasn’t until fall 2007 when the lineup became a quintet, including Matthew Dammer, Jared Price and Eggleston.

From the start, there was a lot of quick buzz surrounding the group’s odd approach to hyping their new creation. They made a Myspace page, but didn’t actually post any samples of their music, opting instead for comical blips and parodies that did not relate to their music whatsoever.

“We kind of, through this series of accidents, came up with this thing where we didn’t post music,” Benjamin explained.
The brothers hadn’t landed on a solid demo yet and were in transition from a two-piece into a larger group. Even if they were posting purely to stall for time as the group took form, it worked. Mt. St. Helens gained a ton of interest; enough that at their first show, there were hundreds of awaiting bodies.

“It was an interesting reaction that we got, so we definitely played into it,” Benjamin said.

Things continued to go well, enough so that Mt. St. Helens went from something of a fling to a full-fledged affair. Comparisons in sound were made with bands such as Wolf Parade and Modest Mouse, thanks in part to the driven scratch of Mt. St. Helens’ urgent guitar chords, swelled by slaps of cymbal and other smack percussive movements, exemplified prominently on songs such as “Albatross, Albatross, Albatross.” Impressive, catchy licks with Benjamin’s lightly fuzzed-yet-piercing vocals are displayed nicely on “Anchors Dropped.”

Mt. St. Helens spent the last year touring across country and playing from their self-titled album (which came out in mid-March), which consists of a lot of Benjamin’s older material, mostly songs quilted together with years of pieced ideas. They’ve also been debuting selections from their upcoming release.

Whenever they can find spare moments, be it on a long stretch of freeway in the van, or at pit stops or cafés, Benjamin and Eggleston take turns helping Marshall with his schoolwork. This wasn’t a choice based purely on touring. A few years back, Marshall realized it was much easier for him to get schooling done on his own, away from the traditional school scenario. Benjamin was already helping Marshall with his schoolwork, but volunteered to take on the role of teacher as well. Even off the road, Benjamin and wife Eggleston take turns helping Marshall with school while the other works a part-time job.

Between the commitment to the band, the family tie and the schooling, the Verdoes brothers are virtually inseparable. Luckily, they have a tight bond.

“I spend almost every waking hour with him it seems like, for the last four years,” Benjamin laughed.

For most kids, the kinds of distractions presented by being a traveling musician and still getting school work done would be too much; but the environment has worked well for Marshall, Benjamin said.

As far as the live shows themselves, it’s still a real treat for audiences to see a youth so precise and talented on drums.
“We work really hard on it, but he definitely has a real gift for it. It’s really cool to watch,” Bejamin said in praise of his younger sibling.

Benjamin still finds himself having to pull his brother’s I.D. out for proof of that he’s underage.

“People—they’ll argue with me, they’ll be like, ‘He’s not 14,'” he said.

For the time being, they’ll be touring through the West Coast and finishing up in the studio, still somewhat curious of their own next step.

“It’ll be definitely interesting how this next record comes out in the spring,” Benjamin said. “How we transition into this real, band, I guess.”

Dan Deacon
Luigi’s Fungarden, Sacramento, California
Monday, Oct. 19, 2009
Words by Vincent Girimonte
Photos by Samantha Saturday

Dan Deacon’s set at Luigi’s Fungarden on Oct. 19 reminded me of that saying, “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.” Manifesting this was a state worker boogying next to some teenage princess probably 20 years his junior; and Deacon himself, pleading with us to imagine a “sky of hair” above the dance floor. Suffice to say nobody was caring.

The Baltimore-bred electronic artist owns one of the more egalitarian live spectacles you’ll come across, and it’s anything but gimmicky, despite the merch peddler performing interpretative dance (which was a little gimmicky). Dancing around isn’t compulsory, just highly encouraged. If that’s not enough to get you moving, peer pressure eventually kicks in to where anybody not sweating through his or her shirt may as well be the chaperone. The result was a Fungarden smelling “like a farm,” as one hooligan put it.

Deacon set up on the floor, caved in with lights, amps and a throng of impatient youths savagely bouncing around near his board, which looks like it was made on Sesame Street. This preferred dynamic may be his referendum on the typical live performance hierarchy (the artist being up there, and everybody else down here, having all the fun); or, perhaps being among his crowd he can more easily organize dance-offs and the ubiquitous “human tunnel”—each making an appearance at Luigi’s. There’s an element of wedding MC in Deacon’s shtick, the one that comes free with the venue and wants everyone to be happy while waiting for the buffet. Sometimes you need that guy.

I would hesitate to call Bromst, Deacon’s second full-length release and the primary source material for Monday’s set, “experimental” if he himself didn’t sometimes classify it as such. Admittedly, this is probably out of my own misinterpretation of the word “experimental,” as in you can’t shake your ass to it. Live, the tone is surging and rich, bringing to mind that “noise in tune” adage—but this is also pop music, implying some accessibility. Deacon plants playful, trippy melodies on the grinding rhythms and manic live-drum samples, and from there it just goes up and up at a breakneck tempo. It’s the music of frolicking optimists, and resonated well within the snug confines of the Fungarden.

He grabbed the mic every now and then for some cathartic chanting—not that he can sing, really, but nobody seemed to mind. By the end of the show he was Uncle Dan, commiserating with the Sacramento audience as a Baltimorean knowing what it’s like to live in a city consistently ignored by the hotshot indie tours. Though if this reputation is what brought Deacon here in the first place, it is one we can surely live with for a little while longer, at least until Uncle Dan returns.

Alison Sudol leads A Fine Frenzy quietly into the spotlight

Alison Sudol’s soft voice creaked from the ear of my phone, sounding positively under the weather.

Christmas comes early this year when A Fine Frenzy makes a stop here in Sacramento at The Boardwalk on Nov. 13. In the meantime, throw another log on the fire and snuggle up to A Fine Frenzy.

You just released your sophomore album Bomb in a Birdcage that’s been doing quite well. Did you ever imagine or was it ever a concern that your next album would equal if not surpass the first?
I think that as an artist and as a person, whatever you do at that moment you want it to be better than what you did before. You want to have learned from the whole process and you want to take all that knowledge and the growth that you’ve made”¦and make something better. It was different in a sense that I made the first one [One Cell in a Sea] essentially in a vacuum. The idea that people were going to hear it was a foreign concept. This time, knowing that people would hear it—people who had bought the first album—there was a likely chance that they would buy the second one just to check it out, even. Just knowing that there was a built-in audience and ears on it before it was even out.

But did you have the mentality that you had to gain the respect of new fans while still maintaining the respect of the old ones?
Oh, well of course! I mean you’ve got to put out something good. You can’t think too much on it and worry too much; it’s counterproductive. Because once you start getting into the realm of trying to please people—I don’t actually know what pleases people except for being honest in music and trying to make stuff that I like to hear. That’s really the only gauge that I can trust at the end of the day. I mean, you never know if people are going to respond to that or not. Hopefully, as long as one is putting out something that one believes in with a wholehearted effort you can’t really go wrong there, because at least you know at the end of the day that you did your best.

You’ve said yourself that you’ve stretched your wings quite a bit more on this record in terms of what you can do sonically. Looking back, do you think you stretched enough? Too much? Do you see your songwriting getting louder and more electric seeing as how you’ve already proven you can woo the crowd with the more tender songs?
Actually, no. I never know which way I’m going to go until it starts going there, you know? I actually want to be more folk-y in my next endeavor, and quieter again. For me, it’s sort of more like a pendulum. I’m really quiet for long enough, and then I want to be really loud. Then I’m really loud and I want to be quiet.
Was it difficult to get into the right mind frame of writing and recording Christmas songs when it was the dead of summer?
You know, you’d think so. There was no doubt about what season it was. It was summer. It was hot. My house has the ability to feel quite Christmas-y year round. I live in like a seven dwarfs cottage, pretty much.

You made an effort to set the mood?
Yeah, I mean it wasn’t really an effort for that particular thing. That’s just how I like to be.I’m sort of a Christmas-year-round kind of a girl. Once I started getting into writing Christmas songs, they just fit into each other. I wouldn’t say it’s easy, because it’s definitely hard to write a Christmas song that doesn’t turn into total cheeseville.
I feel like opinions on Christmas songs are quite polarized. Either people want to gag when they hear them or they become tremendously sentimental and can’t wait until December to play them. I think the Charlie Brown Christmas album is something we can all agree on; was that a conscious decision? Choosing those songs?
The three songs that I chose for this—that we chose, because we really discussed it a lot as a band—were “Blue Christmas,” “Winter Wonderland” and the Charlie Brown Christmas song [“Christmas Time is Here”]. Each of them didn’t feel like the typical Christmas song and yet really personified Christmas for all of us in their own way. The Charlie Brown Christmas song, the hardest thing on that really was that it was done perfectly. Perfect. So we were like, “Wait. How are we going to do this without messing it up? It’s kind of hard not to go downhill from there.” But our version is quite different. The whole album is very much its own thing. Somehow, I don’t know how it happened, but somehow “Blue Christmas” sounds cheerful and “Winter Wonderland” sounds creepy. We just tried to put our own spin on it and bring out something different in the songs and tried not to make them gag-worthy. In the other songs, we do use some Christmas tricks, and there are definitely sleigh bells on here, but we tried not to use the typical Christmas shtick unless we did it 100 percent and did it knowingly.

A Fine Frenzy will performed at The Boardwalk on Nov. 13. Oh Blue Christmas will be available exclusively at Target on Nov. 3.